EMPEROR PENGUIN. 
of apparently ten to fourteen days’ growth. We had no knowledge of the 
length of this Penguin’s incubation. If anything, the Emperor should have 
a longer incubation-period than the King—first, because it is the bigger bird 
and the period of incubation is said to vary with the size of the bird; and 
second, because the temperature of the surrounding air is very distinctly lower 
than it is in the regions where the King Penguins breed ; and this also has been 
said to prolong the time necessary for the purpose. The temperature ranged 
sometimes for ten days together from anything below - 30° F. to - 63° F. 
On September 12th we found that we were again far too late for eggs, and 
that every one of them was hatched. We sadly realised the error we had made 
in calculating the age of the October chicks and, finding no eggs, began to 
supply ourselves with a series of the nestlings. In collecting such, however, 
as were dead and frozen on the ice, we soon came to a spot where we could see 
that some catastrophe had befallen the breeding colony, for we found no less 
than fourteen eggs deserted, lying loose upon the ice, all frozen, and many 
burst by the freezing, but some still perfect and uncracked. It was clear that 
there had been a fall of ice from the cliffs under shelter of which the Penguins 
had been quietly sitting with their eggs a month or two before. It is possible 
that the wholesale loss of eggs is not a rare occurrence. 
There were in this rookery adults, both male and female, to the number of 
about one thousand, and not more than one in ten or twelve was occupied 
at the time of our visit in rearing young. We saw that the chickens with which 
the birds were at present occupied were distinctly smaller than those taken 
in October of the previous year. 
We now knew a good many of the habits of this bird, and they were eccentric 
to a degree rarely met with even in ornithology. First in choosing the darkest 
months of the Antarctic winter in which to incubate its eggs, which are laid 
probably in the first week of July. Then, not only in the choice of season for 
its nesting, but of place. It must needs lay its single egg upon sea-ice with no 
pretence at nesting, removing the egg at once from the surface of the ice to 
rest upon its own feet. There it holds it wedged in between the legs, closely 
pressed to a patch of bare skin in the lower abdomen, and covered from exposure 
to the cold by a loose falling lapet of abdominal skin and feathers. 
That this method which the King, in common with the Emperor Penguin, 
has of holding the egg on its feet, covered up by what is nothing but a fold of 
abdominal skin, should ever have been described as the “ pouching ” of its 
egg is much to be regretted. There is no pouch of any sort or kind into which 
the egg is placed, it is merely held upon the feet to keep it from actual contact 
with the ice or ground, and covered up by a loose and thickly-feathered fold of 
skin to keep it warm. 
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